After the sheer brilliance of Evil Dead Rise(let's be honest, there's never been a bad Evil Dead movie), not one but two continuations of the saga are being worked on.
Evil Dead Burn is now due out this July 22 and now it's been announced that work has begun on Evil Dead Wrath, written and directed by Francis Galluppi.
Nothing is known about the plots of either of these new additions to the franchise, although there are rumours that Bruce Campbell may return as the iconic Ashley J. 'Ash' Williams in Wrath.
Production has begun this week - in Auckland, New Zealand - on Evil Dead Wrath. The occasion was marked by the release of the movie's striking, retro logo (pictured above).
It's the dreaded Black Friday at We Love Toys and the work force are not looking forward to the hordes of shoppers about to pour in, seeking those "once in a lifetime" bargains.
However, what makes matters worse this year is a meteor shower bringing an alien virus that turns the infected into hideous, angry, monsters seeking to both 'spread the love' and construct a 'nest' for each of the initial meteors to achieve their "final form".
Black Friday! is a fun blend of rage zombie horror, Lovecraftian alien invasion, kaiju action, The Blob, Clerks, and old Quatermass movies.
Leaning into its weird fiction inspirations not everything mentioned in the story is explained, adding to the occasionally unnerving strangeness of what the extra-terrestrial entities are up to and what their ultimate objective may be.
There's plenty of body horror in Black Friday!, with the practical make-up effects on the transformed infected being particularly striking as they evolve into piranha-toothed ghouls, oddly reminiscent of the beast in The Unnameable duology
Written by Andy Greskoviak and directed by Casey Tebo, the 84-minute flick is a runaway train that doesn't hang around, getting to the meat of its set-up almost immediately and not wasting any time establishing deep backstories for the central characters (these are filled in during the unfolding chaos).
While the film is a satire of corporate America, it is primarily an apocalyptic splatterfest romp that doesn't take itself at all seriously.
If you're looking for a "people trapped in a store during the end of the world" film, but aren't in the mood for the heart-breaking buzzkill of The Mist, then you could do worse than check out the more light-hearted Black Friday!
Bruce Campbell is in there as the store manager, playing a bigger role than I expected but still a supporting character, while the leads are Final Destination/Chucky's Devon Sawa, Super 8's Ryan Lee, and Pan's Labyrinth's Ivana Baquero, as three undervalued workers in the soulless toy store.
Other familiar faces that pop up include Michael Jai White, while Seth Green provides the voice of a malfunctioning animatronic bear (who might just be a parody of Ted).
Gruff action star and hardman Liam Neeson stars in Sam Raimi's Darkman as Peyton Westlake, an up-and-coming scientist on the verge of creating 3D printable replacement skin.
Unfortunately, Peyton's lab - with him in it - gets trashed and torched by a gang of mobsters looking for an incriminating memorandum that his attorney girlfriend, Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand), has acquired.
Presumed dead, Peyton's body is fished out the river and given an experimental treatment, administered by - of all people - a surprise, and uncredited, cameo appearance by the lovely Jenny Agutter.
This grants the disfigured scientist increased strength and makes him immune to pain, but also means he's prone to fits of berserk anger.
Waking up, Peyton breaks free and returns to the ruins of his lab, where he somehow salvages enough equipment to resume his experiments in replacement skin growth.
With his new abilities, he begins to exact his revenge on the mobsters, who are led by the iconic figure of the late Larry Drake as Robert G Durant.
Durant happens to work for Julie's boss, Louis Strack Jr. (Colin Friels), a corrupt property developer looking to transform the city into his own vision of the 'city of tomorrow'.
Peyton's lab-made skin can only last 99 minutes in sunlight, but he realises that as well as helping to rebuild his own face, he can now impersonate anyone he chooses... as long as he has enough photographs of them to build up a 3D image in his computer.
Before he plunged headfirst into the world of superhero movies with his classic Spider-Man trilogy in the early 2000s, Sam Raimi tested the waters in 1990 with Darkman, his inspired horror spin on the pulp antihero, The Shadow.
However, Darkman also blends in elements of classic, tragic creations from the black-and-white era of creature features, such as The Invisible Man, The Phantom of The Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Frankenstein's monster.
There's even sprinklings of The Incredible Hulk in the mix, with the stylised sequences of the scientist's raging anger and then his sad farewell to Julie at the end when he finally adopts the moniker of Darkman, merging into the crowd wearing the face of Bruce Campbell (another great cameo in a film loaded with them).
Based on Raimi's own story, with a script he helped co-write with Chuck Pfarrer, Ivan Raimi (Sam's brother), Daniel Goldin, and Joshua Goldin, director Sam Raimi created a visually-striking 'superhero' in Darkman, who operates intelligently from the shadows, resorting only to violence in the action-packed grand finale of the 96-minute movie.
While not quite as inventive - or gonzo - as his game-changing Evil Dead movies, Darkman still manages to capture Raimi's delightfully twisted sense of humour.
The "experimental treatment" Peyton receives as a near-dead John Doe is a bit random and never really explained (or revisited), but then again once you accept the weird science of Peyton's DIY replacement skin you know you're in for a wild, pulpy ride where things don't have to make 100 per cent sense to be fun and entertaining.
Two direct-to-video sequels came out in the mid-90s - Darkman II: The Return of Durant and Darkman III: Die Darkman Die - although it will surprise no one that Neeson didn't return as the titular hero, being replaced by The Mummy's Arnold Vosloo, and Sam Raimi took a producing role, leaving the directing to TV director Bradford May.
I will, of course, now be tracking them down (there's a Blu-Ray box set on Amazon with the full trilogy).
The mid-'80s were a Golden Age for schlock horror, with the boom in the home video market providing a hungry audience for low-budget thrills.
One of the many diamonds in a mostly rough field was Stuart Gordon's liberal re-imagining of one of H.P. Lovecraft's lesser works (Lovecraft is on record as saying he hated his stories of Herbert West as they were written for money; "drivel written for the masses").
Re-Animator updates Lovecraft's original to modern times (well, the 1980s) and turns a Frankensteinparody into a darkly, darkly funny Grand Guignol farce.
The simple plot follows the arrival of Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) at Miskatonic University in Arkham, after an "incident" in Switzerland, where he rooms with fellow student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), who is dating the dean's daughter, Meg (Barbara Crampton).
Unbeknownst to all, Meg is also an object of lust for creepy neuroscientist Dr Hill (David Gale), who eventually discovers that West - with the reluctant help of Cain - has been experimenting with a revolutionary re-agent that can give a form of zombie-life to recently deceased bodies.
Events spiral out of control, as they always do, leading to a crazy, climatic, gory zombipalooza in the University hospital's morgue.
As well as a quality script that brings a surprising amount of character to a blood-soaked B-movie, the effects are very inventive - as are some of sicker elements of humour: no one will ever forget the reverse-necrophilia scene where a re-animated corpse tries to get down with blonde-bobbed Meg.
There's also, thanks to Meg, a lot more female flesh on display in this 86-minute film than I recall seeing in the sequels.
Of course, I can't really pass comment on this film without singing the praises of Jeffrey Combs.
This was the film that made him a B-movie star and while he may not have the same instant name recognition as Bruce Campbell I'd put them on very similar levels as comedy horror legends.
While Campbell has the square-jawed hero role down pat, Combs is the man to call if you want a single-minded, amoral, mad scientist.
Rachel took one look at the Blu-Ray sleeve for Evil Dead Rise and proclaimed: "Oh my God! Doesn't that give you nightmares?"
From that reaction, I suspected I was on to a winner with the latest entry in the evergreen Evil Dead franchise.
But writer/director Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise did more than simply earn its place among the other flawless horror flicks to bear the Evil Dead moniker, it far exceeded my expectations.
After a grisly cold open that serves as a slight misdirect, focus shifts back 24 hours to a condemned tower block in Los Angeles where pregnant guitar technician Beth (Lily Sullivan, from the Picnic at Hanging Rock miniseries) is reuniting with her estranged sister, tattoo artist and single mum Ellie (Viking's Princess Aslaug, Alyssa Sutherland).
Ellie sends her kids - teenagers Danny (Morgan Davies) and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and youngest child Kassie (Nell Fisher) - out for pizza, when an earthquake strikes.
The kids are in the parking garage under the apartment complex. Danny sees that a hole has opened up, seemingly leading into a dusty old bank vault of some kind.
He drops down to investigate - unperturbed by all the crucifixes hanging from the ceiling - and comes away with a collection of old records and a strange book, which he thinks might be valuable.
Unwrapping the book in his bedroom, the fun begins... it is, of course, the Naturom Demonto aka The Book of The Dead aka the Necronomicon.
When he plays the records, he discovers they are recordings from the 1920's of a priest who'd found the book and sought church permission to translate it. When he was refused, he and a couple of other rebellious priests did it anyway... recording passages of the book onto the Shellac 78.
Naturally, if you've seen any of the other Evil Dead movies you can guess what happens next.
Ellie becomes possessed by the summoned Deadite and goes on a rampage, seeking to swallow souls and rain down chaos in her wake.
Transformed Ellie is a terrifying creature, both from her physical brutality and the psychological torture she is able to inflict on her children and her sister.
Cronin's script cleverly transposes the "innocents trapped in an isolated cabin in the woods" setting from the original films to "innocents trapped in an isolated apartment in a rundown tower block", and it works wonderfully.
The constant action mixes canny foreshadowing of carnage to come with an abundance of Evil Dead standards (from a flying eyeball and a chainsaw to key lines of dialogue).
With pitch perfect pacing, this gradually escalates - as more people fall prey to the Deadites - to an amazing, over the top, grandest of Grand Guignol finales with so much blood... oh, so much blood.
Trapped inside their small home, the protagonists - and, ultimately, the antagonists - have access to a vast array of sharp kitchen implements, and other household objects that can easily be converted into weaponry, which leads to an abundance of creative violence (NB. the already infamous cheese grater moment is thankfully quick and not quite as graphic as it could have been).
Outside of the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise takes visual cues from numerous other horror films, as diverse as [REC 3] and Aliens (Kassie might as well be called Newt).
If it lacks anything, it's the broad slapstick humour of the Ash (Bruce Campbell) era movies, although the final confrontation definitely has its moments. Instead the 96-minute movie veers, in that respect, more towards the gritty verisimilitude of the parallel universe iteration/remake from 2013.
This is not a criticism, but an observation, because I didn't feel that Evil Dead Rise needed non-stop knockabout humour.
Without a doubt this is one of the best films I've seen this year. I love pretty much all flavours of horror, but my favourite is this kind of action-adventure horror, pitting man against monster.
Evil Dead Rises satisfies that craving, while leaving me hungry for more sequels from Lee Cronin, who has proved himself a worthy successor to Sam Raimi et al who gifted us with the original Evil Dead.
Evil Dead Rise is now available on Blu-Ray and DVD in the UK.
Although it features cast and crew of the original Evil Dead trilogy, the 79-minute Canadian documentary Hail to The Deadites is first and foremost about the fan community that has grown up around this legendary horror franchise.
There's elements about cosplay and props, and our two hosts even attend a performance of Evil Dead: The Musical.
While this semi-travelogue format sometimes feels a bit odd, it allows us access to both some incredible collections of memorabilia curated by hardcore 'Deadites' and fascinating anecdotes about the importance of fan communities.
These range from the heart-breaking story of a radio DJ and his infant son named Ash to a powerful message from Bruce Campbell himself on the impact positive fan support can have on actors.
Given that the low-budget documentary doesn't use any footage from the actual movies - instead relying on fan films - I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of Bruce Campbell that crops up in Hail To The Deadites.
He seems to know that he owes a large amount of his success - and the success of the Evil Dead brand - to his enthusiastic fan base, and so is more than willing to give back to the community when he can.
In fact everyone connected with the movies who appears in the documentary seems really pleasant and appreciative.
That said, I'm glad this fun and, largely, light-hearted documentary resisted the urge to delve too deeply into the "making of" the movies - as this has been covered elsewhere - and stuck to its core directive of focusing on fandom.
While the 2013 version of Evil Dead gets a fleeting nod, and Bruce Campbell explains that Ash vs Evil Dead is their response to fans constantly demanding "more Evil Dead", I can't help feeling that had the documentary not limited itself to simply fans of the original movies there could have been more material.
The spin-off comics, for instance, don't even get a mention - except when seen in brief glimpses in people's collections - and I would have loved to have had longer guided tours of fans' museums of Evil Dead memorabilia.
What I'm trying to say is that what there is in this documentary is very engaging, but coming in at just under 80 minutes you can't help but think there was plenty more that could have been included.
Conversely there are moments that feel like they are included simply because the documentary film makers had the footage and wanted another recognisable name in the credits - even if the clip doesn't really relate to fandom.
Of course, Hail to The Deadites is a fan-made, crowdfunded, work and more expansive coverage would have almost certainly bust their budget, so I understand.
But, as good as it is as a celebration of this specialised branch of geekdom, the documentary leaves you wanting more.
A group of friends go to an isolated family cabin in the woods to help one of their number, Mia (Jane Levy), go cold turkey.
When they arrive they discover the cabin has been broken into and a foul stench - that only Mia can smell - leads them to the fruit cellar where it appears a black magic ritual has been performed in the recent past.
They also discover an ancient book down there, secured with barbed wire, bound in human flesh and written in blood.
When inquisitive school teacher Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) tries to read the book, he unknowingly unleashes demonic forces from Hell...
Evil Dead is a reworking of Sam Raimi's original 1981 "spam-in-a-cabin", horror masterpiece, The Evil Dead (and is produced by the three men at the heart of this undying franchise: Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell).
By the end of the pre-credits, scene-setting, opening I knew I was going to like this film.
While it may take visual and stylistic cues from the original (and Evil Dead II and, even The Exorcist), this "parallel universe" Evil Dead - as Bruce Campbell calls it in the extras - mixes things up nicely to keep fans on their toes. There is no analogue of the Ash character, for instance (this was one of the things in the script that sealed Campbell's involvement).
Dressed up in modern sensibilities, the movie delivers a pretty unrelenting cavalcade of carnage, only sagging momentarily as it takes a breather at the end of the second act before kicking things up a gear again for a blood-drenched finale.
Grand Guignol writ large, this is not a film for the faint of heart and while it has some moments of darkest black humour, it plays its horror straight and with conviction.
Except for the slight "cheat" on defeating the demon (the film's one major weak point in my view, in its need to conform to the "last girl" trope), the screenplay by director Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues is unforgetably brutal, gruesome and inventive.
It manages to play merry havoc with the everyday household items found in the cabin (Stanley knife, electric meat carver, nail gun and... er... chainsaw) in wince-inducing ways without resorting to stale torture porn.
By no stretch is this Evil Dead better than the original - or its sequel (which itself was pretty much a remake) - but it is a wild reinvention that both honours the '80s version and takes it in new directions.
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, superheroes, comic books, westerns, horror, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc
